Abstract

Efforts to combat and prevent transnational terrorism rely, to a great extent, on the effective allocation of security resources. Critical to the success of this allocation process is the identification of the likely geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. We construct the network of transnational terrorist attacks, in which source (sender) and target (receiver) countries share a directed edge, and we evaluate a network analytic approach to forecasting the geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. We integrate a deterministic, similarity-based, link prediction framework [1] into a probabilistic modeling approach [2] in order to develop an edge-forecasting method. Using a database of over 12,000 transnational terrorist attacks occurring between 1968 and 2002 [3], we show that probabilistic link prediction is not only capable of accurate forecasting during a terrorist campaign, but is a promising approach to forecasting the onset of terrorist hostilities between a source and a target.

Highlights

  • The accurate forecasting of transnational terrorism is among the most pressing problems of contemporary security policy

  • The literature is moot in terms of statistical models designed to forecast attacks during terrorist campaigns, but to forecast emerging terrorist threats, and do so with a high degree of locational specificity: predicting when but from which country transnational terrorist attacks will emanate. Such a tool would provide insight from an academic perspective and prove useful from a policy perspective. It is with this aim that we develop a hybrid methodology from both deterministic and stochastic edge prediction techniques to predict the timing and locational dynamics of transnational terrorism

  • We first review the temporal exponential random graph modeling (TERGM) approach to modeling networks, we describe the vertex-similarity measures and how we incorporate them into the TERGM modeling framework

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Summary

Introduction

The accurate forecasting of transnational terrorism is among the most pressing problems of contemporary security policy. The first thread of literature, developed largely in the field of political science, has linked higher probabilities of transnational terrorist violence to target states that have democratic governments [4], politically left governments [5], more veto-players in their governments [6], are perceived to be more likely to grant concessions to terrorists [7], and have further economic reach [8] While this literature does much to shed light on the factors that may make a state more likely to suffer transnational terrorist attacks, it does little to provide forecasts of terrorist violence with any degree of precision. This literature, based at the intersection of political science and economics, has established that terrorist attacks exhibit cycling behavior [9], the number of terrorist attacks is decreasing but their lethality is increasing [10], substantial increases in levels of violence are usually unsustainable for the terrorist group [11], terrorist attacks are persistent following shocks in states suffering from low levels of terrorism (not for states suffering high levels of terrorism) [12], and terrorists tend to substitute targets when one type of target is hardened [13]

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